Why was it there in the first place I wonder?

  • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlOPM
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    1 year ago

    Well that certainly seems like shitty counter insurgency. It doesn’t effect the material reasons that led to insurgents and creates more martyrs which increases recruitment and helps align the civilian population with the insurgency. The vietnamese knew this 50 years ago which is one of the reasons the US got its ass handed to it, has the US not learned it still?

    Outside of the tactic not being effective though, why is the US interested in doing counterinsurgency in the region?

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would imagine western intelligence is very useful in fighting Isis. It certainly has been a huge boon for Ukraine in their war. As for why the west is interested in stopping the spread of Islamic extremism in Africa, foreign safe harbors for extremists often end up being training grounds for terrorists that attack the west.

      • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Uh… Hate to break it to you, champ, but no one has trained, funded, and armed more Islamic extremists than the US. Maybe the US should GTFO of the places that it completely fucked up and let the sovereign nations that are impacted deal with it themselves. If those nations need help, maybe the US and Europe can start to return the trillions of dollars it stole from the continent.

        • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I won’t disagree that the US has short-sightedly funded a lot of mujahideen fighters including recently some questionable groups in Syria, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re directly opposed to the Islamists in Saharan Africa. As for your suggestion that the US return the money they stole (despite the fact that they weren’t really involved in African colonialism), they account for over a fifth of all aid to Africa.

          • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            I won’t disagree that the US has short-sightedly funded a lot of mujahideen fighters including recently some questionable groups in Syria, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re directly opposed to the Islamists in Saharan Africa.

            “This time it’s different, I swear, just give me one more undeclared forever war”

          • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            The US wasn’t involved in African colonialism? Aside from the fact that they profited immensely from the slave trade they were part of the Berlin Conference. Then followed all of the neocolonialism where they participated in ensuring European/American control over natural resources through coups, support for puppet regimes, etc.

            As for aid to Africa, for every dollar of aid the US sends to Africa, more than twice that amount is extracted from Africa. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries

            You can’t just diminish the US’s role in literally creating modern terrorism and just wave it off by saying they are definitely out there fighting the good fight. And you can’t say that because the US wasn’t part of the initial colonization of African that it doesn’t benefit from and participate in the theft of billions from the continent annually. You have to actually do the research into the history and present-day and at least try to understand the whole thing instead of just believing what Western PR firms say.

            Yes, the US gives aid as part of the cover they need to extract more. The wealth the West is loaning to Africa is literally Africa wealth. Why should the West be charging massive amounts of interest and fees and attaching political strings to loans of money to Africa when that money is Africa’s in the first place? The idea that colonialism is over and the US isn’t part of it is just refusal to engage in the contemporary understanding of neocolonialism and how it looks, behaves, and how destructive it is.

            Yes, the US is fighting ISIS but the US also gave rise to ISIS. The US should not be there fighting ISIS because whatever comes next will be worse. ISIS is already the 3rd generation of terrorism spawned through blow back against US policy, strategy, and tactics. You really want to see the 4th generation? Because that’s what’s going to emerge from the US fighting ISIS. The US doesn’t give a shit about the impact of terrorism in Africa and Asia. They fucking created it on purpose, and it has proven to be an incredibly lucrative phenomenon for them. They love being able to whip everyone into a blood frenzy with the topic.

            And lest you think this was an old mistake from the before times: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/environmental-law-review/blog/an-old-enemy-the-regressive-tendencies-of-american-foreign-policy/

            The CIA is still working with extremists and terrorists - training, arming, and organizing them - for geostrategic aims, mostly fighting communism and securing oil and mineral profits.

            So. Yeah. Fuck the US. They need to get the fuck out of Africa and they along with the rest of the North Atlantic need to begin the process of reparations. And that’s going to be in the trillions of dollars just for the last 50 years so they need to get started now as it will take decades for them to find ways to give back to Africa what they stole.